Special Effects (1984) As a would-be, aspiring (or perspiring) screenwriter ourselves, we've always been a Larry Cohen fanboy.......
How could we not? After spending decades grinding out countless TV episodes, Cohen fully emerged in the 1970's as the most ornery, inventive and downright crazy writer-director of the most ornery, inventive and downright crazy little movies ever seen.
And his films, especially his lunatic excursions into horror ,sci-fi, and fantasy are still beloved today as cockeyed classics....("God Told Me To", "Q-The Winged Serpent", "The Stuff" and of course the immortal "It's Alive" monster baby trilogy.)
Long before Hollywood adopted the phrase "high concept" as a way to categorize script ideas with a singular, irresistible hook to them, Larry Cohen had already written dozens of such scripts......and somehow, on impoverished budgets, turned a bunch of 'em of them into movies.
Ever the idea man, his "Special Effects" script was his wild stab at the kind of twisted semi-Hitchcock homage that Brian DePalma was doing to carve out his own flourishing career. (with films like "Sisters", "Obsession" and "Body Double")
But herein lay the problem in Cohen's work. Unlike the young new visual stylists like DePalma, Spielberg and Scorcese, he had no real talent as a director. As brilliant and original as his script ideas were, his direction of them was never better than that of a mediocre journeyman, a shlockmeister with no real ability to tell a story cinematically.
Though Larry Cohen's films invariably came out looking slapdash, amateurish and raggedly put together ,what great nutty ideas they displayed......
"Special Effects" begins in a grungy New York porn studio decked out like the White House Oval Office . A heartland rube (Brad Rijn) tries to coerce his wayward young wife (Zoe Lund) to give up her quest to become an actress-model and return home to help raise their toddler son.
Fleeing her husband, she ends up in the arms of an egomaniacal film director (Eric Bogosian) , currently persona non grata in Hollywood due to the colossal failure of his latest effects-laden mega-budget turkey. When she unwisely mocks the director about this as they grapple in bed together, he films himself strangling her to death with a hidden camera. After he's dumped the body in Coney Island, that leaves heartland hubby as the prime suspect.
When the hapless rube is charged with his wife's murder, the mad scheming director arranges his release on bail, with the intention of using the poor sap to help him make a reality-based film on the dead wife's unhappy life and brutal death.........which will inevitably insure the rube's conviction for killing her.
And in a twist of 'Vertigo' like fate, the actress recruited to play the wife is literally a dead ringer for the real thing.......and played, as you might already guess, by....surprise, surprise....Zoe Lund again.
Yes, it's every bit as off-the-wall and far-fetched as it sounds, but as always, Cohen's direction remains flat, ordinary and uninspired. And unlike his "It's Alive" movies, which hugely benefited from a Bernard Herrmann score, the droning electronic music here only makes the film appear cheaper than it already is.
There is one true wild card in play here......the star-crossed, doomed Zoe Lund, who was more like a startling performance artist than an actual actress. In her previous cult hit "Ms.45", she forever stood out as a rape victim who goes on a vengeful rampage. There's no real skill or craft in her work, but with her huge expressive eyes and pouting lips, we defy you take your eyes off her.
The level of barely contained madness in her work matched her real life, in which her recreational enjoyment of heroin addiction destroyed her health and killed her at age 37.
As for "Special Effects"......we'll admit we're biased, since we're such a major fan of Larry Cohen's screenplays.......even if his execution of them never quite matched the audacity of his 'high concepts'. Though other directors may have easily exceeded him in cinema stylings, very few of them could equal him his creation of attention-getting stories.......
And that makes any Cohen film, including this one, an automatic 3 stars (***) for us....and more than worth checking out.
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